Re-Thinking E-Learning Research

Norm Friesennfriesen@tru.ca

Overview

Chapters have appeared in:

• Mind, Culture & Activity

• AI & Society

• ijCSCL

• E-Learning

• Ubiquity

Overview

Re-thinking assumptions about technology:

• Technology as the driving force for educational change– Technology & faculty

change– Technology & research

paradigms• Research across the

disciplines

Technology & Educational Change

• A new technology “impacts” student outcomes, student satisfaction, education overall

• Technology as a disruptive force in organizations, institutions

• Technologies “afford” certain pedagogies by virtue of their design or function

• Technological change as occurring by law

Example: “tipping point”

• The… "opportunity to [act] before the tipping point arrives will occur only once.“

• “…tools and techniques are developing at an accelerated rate, a rate that calls for an effective response—the preparedness of educators in schools with technology integrated into all subject areas.“

Impact of Technology

Technology is a force acting from outside

Technology acts on its ownThe arrival of technology is

inevitableThe object impacted is

otherwise immobileThe consequences of

impact are massive

From: Darkmatter

Laws of Technological Change

• Moore's law (the regular doubling of computer processor speeds)

• Gladwell's "tipping point" (change occurs via an "epidemic" dynamic)

• Kurzweil's "law of accelerating returns" (the exponential nature of technical innovation)

These laws may hold in terms of the spread of disease, or numbers of transistors. But…

But…

Changes in technological capability• Bandwidth, processing power, storageDo not result in direct and proportionate

changes in: • learning abilities, • teaching performance • use of technologies• Other institutional metrics

Wikipedia 2009

Encoded in Research Designs

Rogers’ "Dissemination of Innovation" Model:• Technology disseminated through a

population• Adoption and resistance as the only responses• technology as a kind of "unmoved mover,"

decisively influencing education from the outside

• Technology as pre-given in its uses, design, purposes, functions, etc.

Wikipedia 2009

Encoded in Research Designs

quasi-experimental designs that define technology as a treatment or control

• Measure its educational effects or outcomes• produces results deemed either controversial,

inconclusive or as “fatally flaw[ed]” (Bernard et. al. 2004; Russell, 1997

• fundamental questions about technology & change are unasked and unanswered; instead, a tacit understanding is shared…

Technological Determinism

• technological determinism: “the belief that social progress is driven by technological innovation, which in turn follows an ‘inevitable’ course.” Smith, 1994, p 38; also http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/tecdet/tecdet.html

• “optimistic” hard determinism: “the advance of technology leads to a situation of inescapable necessity [with the future being] the outcome of many free choices and the realization of the dream of progress…”(Marx & Smith, 1994; xii).

Counter-Examples

• “progress” can sometimes fail, or be stopped dead in its tracks –or can be “co-opted” (DCMI)

• The persistence of the classroom as a site of educational practices

• The Web as being modified and adapted for education: WebCT or Moodle

• adaptation has occurred in a manner that seems to have had the end effect of reinforcing rather than disrupting many conventional educational practices and organizations.

Technology as Negotiated

• Users interpret & “domesticate” technologies• Computer and communication technologies

are open to multiple uses, non-uses, & improvisations

• Processes of construction & negotiation• is "an 'ambivalent' process of development"

that is "suspended between different possibilities" (Andrew Feenberg, 2002, p. 15)

• Web 2.0 specially suited to this approach

Feenberg: Technology in E-Learning?

• Technology is not a destiny for e-learning

• Technology is instead a scene of engagement & struggle